A Thousand Years of Dreaming - A Solo by Debashish Paul : Curated by Mario D’Souza

A barren, sandy landscape stretches in the distance. As the fog parts, a town glistens on the horizon. It is difficult to determine if it is dawn or dusk, but it seems constant, long and perhaps permanent. This desert is in truth the bank of a perennial river, making lush all that it touches (or almost). Here sinners come to wash their sins and the dead to find the divine. It is believed to drink its waters to liberate the soul. That Debashish Paul chooses this desert-like patch, where no flower blooms, is very simply a reference to an othering, where not everyone is allowed access or can partake in this lushness. This choice stems directly from his experiences as a queer person living and loving discreetly in a small, conservative town; a simple criticism of selective, privileged ideas of agency and liberation underscores this body of work. 

In these sands, and from a shallow grave, in an image reminiscent of the many unnamed, infected bodies abandoned on such banks in the wake of a pandemic not too long ago, Paul embraces his beloved like the lovers of Hasanlu, of Valdaro. To invoke these references is to speak of abandonment - of those pushed beyond the acceptable margins of civilized societies; of bodies governed or restricted by laws, rendered pariah or vilified as contaminated - of bodies that are now bones, yet precious monuments to a long struggle for determination. These bodies are a sacrifice, evidence and an archaeological site.  

Paul operates beyond these margins, to revel in chosen families. This world is not make-believe, but hidden in plain sight.  

This opening sequence of his film, A Thousand Years of Dreaming, is set in Benares on the banks of the Ganges. An enactment of a distant, seemingly impossible ritual akin to a marriage between two men and some semblance of intimate life, are interspersed with scenes of the artist’s desires, frustrations and struggles. Complete with a wedding band and a white horse, the barely dressed protagonists played by Paul and his lover are adorned in flowers – their bare bodies in intimate proximity. The second segment follows the process of masking and shedding, washing and soaking, frustration and exhaustion amongst other states resulting from this concealment of sexual identities and constant posturing. Paul breathes heavily, like he was gasping for breath, suffocating under the claustrophobia and weight of this second, synthetic public skin that he wears to fit in – be something that he isn’t – and find acceptance. The metaphors are sometimes direct, like that of cleaning oneself because of a sensation of impurity. 

Woven around the film A Thousand Years of Dreaming, the body of work includes performance stills, drawings and sculptures. Paul treats costumes with sculptural tenacity. The liquid latex is adorned with detritus of temple offerings and religious rituals - cowrie shells, stone eyes and colourful threads. In wearing these, he repositions and codes these pariah beings as the sacred. Titled Shells of Past Lives, these adornments on garment-sculptures almost look like growth or fossilization from being exposed to conditions of the world. The skin is no longer smooth, it is seasoned with experiences and stories. Paul’s drawings abstract the body and its concealing garments into stretched, fantastical bodies that are man, animal, limb and cloth. This body is vulnerable though, in search and transition.  

Paul remains with the autobiographical-fantastical lens of his own romantic relationship and the places he calls home. Herein mask and costume along with ritual and play become devices of coming to terms with the complexity of leading double lives but also survival. Amidst all this there is a search for permanence, or some version of it. I return to the image of Paul and his lover, lying in an embrace in a shallow grave, to notice as we all must, that in his world a finger-drawn flower blooms in the sand where no real flowers grow. 

Mario D’Souza 
2024